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Wednesday, 7 November 2012

My name is not Ruby Miller and this book is not about me. Although, it could be.

Except it could not, never. I would never ever ever ever go and meet my idol. I’m too much of a coward. This is why I watch Buffy on TV—or DVDs now—and why I am not Buffy.

But Ruby Miller is the zombie slayer. Or at least she pretends to be.

She’s a fan of zombie comic books and does all the things a young fan does. She spends too much time on the internet and discussing the comics with her friends. She also acted in a fanvideo and goes to the same school the creator of Zocopalypse graphic novels went to. She meets him, Gabe Foster, and ends up a little deeper in the fantasy world than any other fan.

As understandable as the situation in which Ruby meets Gabe for the second time is, I’m disappointed that once again the story starts with a guy coming to a girl’s rescue. After that, Ruby handles it all well, almost too well for an eighteen year old girl. She has her best friend Iris and her parents to support her, but how many of us would know how to act in the sudden spotlight of fame?

In Fangirl, the fangirl gets to live the other side of the industry. Not just see it, but to live it. Or a fictionalised version of it. Of course there’s romance and predictable relationship drama thrown into the mix to make things more realistic.

I had most fun with the fannish aspects like the lingo of the story even if certain nods to fanfics made me grit my teeth—Gabriel’s Inferno? Was that really necessary? The footnote commentary I found extraneous. It wasn’t there purely to add snark to Ruby’s voice and the informative facts for non-fans were useless to me because I know what IMDb.com is, but as I said, I’ve lived the fangirl side of things. I am still living it. It was a nice try to avoid infodumping, but it’d been better had the information buried within the body of the text. The romantic subplot was as predictable as ever as was Andrew’s secret.

This is a fun, straightforward Mary Sue self-insert novel for each and every fan of anything and everything ever. It’s labelled as Young Adult fiction but could be read by younger children and even people almost twice the age of the characters.

The footnotes effect is a hit-or-miss thing for me. If I truly think they add something to the story I'll tolerate and maybe even like them, but most of the time I just want to breeze through the text without stopping to investigate every note.

I thought FanGirl was a fun book. I do think you've missed the point of the footnotes, though: rather than an avoidance of infodump (which it does nicely), it seemed to me that they were an expression of Ruby's personality. She's a footnote/sidenote kind of girl, the type that will wander off into conversational sideroads at the drop of a hat. They also fit nicely into the 'documentary' style of narrative. Kids of Ruby's age (and I have a daughter going through this right now)are inundated with instruction about 'proper' writing style. Footnoting is a big part of that. To me, that added to the realism of the book.

Thank you. I was hoping the footnotes would truly be an expression of Ruby's personality, but too many of them were simply quick facts for the people living outside the fandom loop. Even if Ruby was providing helpful information for the unversed, she could have done it with her unique voice. She didn't.

Self-published books can be bit of an mixed bag, but none of my complaints were about the editing, grammar, or publishing quality. Those were good. It was the story I was criticizing as it wasn't a perfect match for my taste.

As a rule of a thumb, when I don't mention editing or grammar, it's a good sign. Or course, there always are people more discerning than I.

Yes they can. On the publishing quality side of things, this is one of the better ones. The story is such that it might have been difficult if not impossible to get published through the traditional channels, and though it wasn't perfect for me I know people who've enjoyed it immensely.